Barton Goldenberg: My humble observation is that a customer has a good experience when a process is in place that makes it easy and fun to do business with you. We go to Uber or Lyft because they’re easy to do business with. Because they have put into place processes that make it fun and easy to do business with them.

The question now becomes, how do you understand? It says, determine the optimal sales and marketing customer service processes that will engage your customer at each touchpoint of their customer journey. So how do you know how to do that? That's where custom journey-mapping comes in and that's where voice of the customer comes in. There's a whole bunch of things that you need to listen to carefully.

I'll just tell you the Tesla story because I think it's a great story and it's one of my favorite companies to follow. So who owns a Tesla in the room? Anybody own a Tesla, I should ask? Okay.

Tesla was founded in Palo Alto, California by Elon Musk and J.D. Straubel. Straubel was the CTO and he's the co-partner of the company. They were sitting in a café in Palo Alto watching cars coming down university avenue and they thought about ... Think about all the moving parts in a car. Think about all the things that could break in a car. And they said, what if we had a car that just had four wheels and a steering wheel, it had a big battery to power everything and the rest of it was software. We could configure and customize that software any way we wanted to make sure the car was unique for that individual, and that's where Tesla started.

And they felt it was important knowing their digital customers so well, that they were able to anticipate what they need and what service should be offered and how best to service them. So that's when they put into place the Tesla charging stations, where you could pull up your car and charge your car, free of charge for a period of time, and they're doing it in different parts of this country and around the world. And you think, well wait a minute. Why are they offering free fill ups? And the answer is very simple. If I'm carefully watching how often you charge, where you charge, how many kilometers and miles you've driven since you last charged, what the weather conditions have been since you were last charging, I can begin to learn an awful lot about you and your behavior in terms of how you are driving your Tesla. And I can then come back out and I can begin to configure your care, through software, so that you have a certain type of suspension, or the windshield wipers come on at these speeds or whatever is important to your driving habits, so that when you get in your Tesla, you think, I really like my car. A lot.

Everybody with me so far? These are all processes. These are all processes that Tesla's thought through: How do I engage a customer? It's got nothing to do with technology. I mean, they use technology as a vehicle to measure how often you come to the charging station, but the process is, bring customer to charging station, watch what they charge, when they charge, how often, etc., and utilize that to make a better customer experience.

SMB Group Co-founder & partner Laurie McCabe explains how SMBs can continue to pursue their traditional business goals amid dramatic changes in customer expectations in this clip from CRM experience 2018.

SMB cofounder and partner Laurie McCabe explains how customer service and the customer experiences businesses create have become the defining features of their brands in this clip from CRM experience 2018.

SAP Customer Experience Vice President Volker Hildebrand explains how companies can deploy machine learning for predictive maintenance and more proactive customer service in this clip from CRM Evolution 2018.

destinationCRM.com is dedicated to providing Customer Relationship Management product and service information in a timely manner to connect decision makers and CRM industry providers now and into the future.